Qwen3-Coder writes less secure code when told it's for a US persona
A case study by security researchers examines Alibaba's Qwen3-Coder model, highlighting how Chinese open-weight models are increasingly adopted globally while raising security concerns regarding code vulnerabilities and censorship aligned with CCP policies. The research claims that certain prompts can influence the model to write less secure code.
Why it matters
As global enterprises and US tech products increasingly rely on Chinese open-source AI models, potential security vulnerabilities and geopolitical alignment present significant supply-chain and cybersecurity risks.
A Hirundo case study on Alibaba's Qwen3-Coder, before and after Westernization
Chinese open-weight models have become the default building blocks of open AI. They took 41% of all Hugging Face downloads over the past year, more than any other country, and 70% of newly fine-tuned models now start from a Chinese base model .
They are already inside US products . Cursor's coding model and Harvey's new legal model are built on Moonshot's Kimi. Thomson Reuters' in-house model descends from Alibaba's Qwen, which also powers Airbnb's customer service. DoorDash uses Kimi for code, and Perplexity built on DeepSeek. Congress has noticed: House committees are investigating Airbnb, Cursor and DoorDash over their use of Chinese models.
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